The staging of the greatest spectacle of Napoléon III’s Second Empire, the1867
Exposition Universelle, did not go uncontested. In a series of wood engravings produced
for the conservative magazine Le Monde illustré, and which stand as testimony to the
power of images, the caricaturist Honoré Daumier challenged the Emperor’s World’s Fair
and the Fete Imperiale rhetoric it espoused. Two caricatures realized from the Le Monde
illustré series evidence Daumier’s subversive strategies to circumvent Napoléon III’s
censorship and fashion a defiant political criticism of the régime. Foremost amongst
these I argue is Daumier’s deployment of slang or argot --the “unofficial” language of the
streets and associated with suppressed members of the working classes under the Second
Empire--prostitutes, ragpickers, and ouvriers. Daumier’s caricatures set these
marginalized argot voices into collision with the “official” rhetoric of the Emperor’s
World’s Fair. Drawing on Bakhtin’s concepts of Menippean satire and the
‘carnivalesque this thesis also explores how Daumier’s images mock and ridicule
representations of authority and dogma. Crucially, however, stepping past the practice of
a satire of negation, Daumier’s caricatures can be understood as refashioning the utopian
promise and regenerative dimension of laughter derived from the ancient past into
something more distinctly modern. The Second Empire was not only a time of class
conflict but an era characterized by a lost revolutionary possibility. Indeed, it was the
brutal reality of the unrealized ambitions of large segments of the working classes
crushed in June 1848 that permeates the history of this time. Daumier’s World’s Fair
images were produced at a shifting historical moment in the mid 1860’s of increasing
political consciousness of the working classes. Glimpsed in this context, Daumier’s
caricatures can be read at one level as “counter images” to the Exposition, disarming the
politically anesthetizing phantasmagoria of the Napoléon III’s Fair, rooted in Saint-
Simonian notions of progress. However, at another level they can also be understood
through their mobilization of the voice of argot and the hidden suppressed language of
the working classes as refashioning the fearless utopian promise of laughter as a weapon
of class struggle.

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